Once a modest online seller of books, Amazon is now one of the largest companies in the world, and its former CEO, Jeff Bezos, is the world’s most wealthy person. We track developments, both of Bezos and Amazon, its growth as a video producer, the popular Prime service, as well as its own hardware, which includes the Amazon Kindle e-reader, Amazon Kindle Fire tablets, and Amazon Fire TV streaming boxes.
The new trailer for Amazon MGM’s adaptation of Alex Weir’s novel Project Hail Mary teases a bit more of the catastrophe that’s imperiling Earth, but it’s mostly about the friendship that’s going to develop between astronaut Dr. Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) and an alien that looks like a pile of rocks.
Ring’s ‘chief inventor’ on AI, lost dogs, and why cameras aren’t dystopian.
“We’ve parted ways with just under 30 team members across various departments and projects as we restructure the company and business for our next generation,” the studio wrote in a LinkedIn post.
Lucy and the Ghoul have started warming up to each other in the new trailer season two of Amazon’s Fallout series. And the duo’s hunt for Lucy’s father, Hank has them trekking to a very bleak and mutant-filled New Vegas.
Amazon’s Echo Show 8 and Echo Show 11 launch this week, here are my first impressions
The new feature is coming first to Canada, allowing users to connect and share music with like-minded fans across genres like rock, country, and K-pop. In Fan Groups, users can join or create chat threads, as well as save recommendations from others.
Amazon Music plans on bringing Fan Groups to the US and other countries next year.
We’ve been waiting for BMW’s next-gen voice assistant for a while now. The custom Alexa voice assistant for was initially announced in 2022, but progress has been slow in an attempt to build it around Amazon’s more capable LLM-powered Alexa Plus. Now BMW and Amazon say that customers will be able to experience it “soon.” How soon? We don’t know! Which models? Unclear!
Friend of The Verge Casey Newton has some thoughts on the Amazon v. Perplexity web browser battle about AI agents: Perplexity wants to encourage people to use their agents in order to build its own business, but this screws basically every business that runs on web pages, including Amazon. (Humans can look at ads, sign up for newsletters, engage in curiosity-oriented browsing, etc.) Perplexity is a known bad actor. I hope Jeff Bezos eats them alive.
[Platformer]
At least according to Big Tech’s latest earnings calls.
The WSJ highlights this shift, which has brought Pepsi-retrieving robots to one Whole Foods store and will soon turn the grocery chain’s corporate workers into Amazon employees.
Whole Foods CEO Jason Buechel also told employees that Amazon’s recent layoffs will help “simplify the way we run the business across our grocery brands,” the WSJ reports.
[The Wall Street Journal]
Spotify hasn’t launched a native app for Amazon’s new Vega OS yet, so Amazon built a clunky workaround for the first Fire TV stick running Vega.
The “Boximus” avatars are for Yuga Labs’ Otherside metaverse, and they cost $65.99 each while they were available. If you’re really disappointed you missed out on a chance to own a digital, anthropomorphized Amazon box, you can buy one on the resale market.
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The hardware finally feels ready, but Alexa Plus is still a work in progress.
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The Atmos smart speaker goes up against the HomePod 2… and wins.
As part of the layoffs announced today, according to an executive memo reported on by Bloomberg, “we have made the difficult decision to halt a significant amount of our first-party AAA game development work – specifically around MMOs – within Amazon Game Studios.”
History tells us that Warner Bros. Discovery’s plan to sell itself is probably going to end in disaster.
The Roomba robot vacuum maker reported in a regulatory filing that its last potential buyer has withdrawn. The company, which has been seeking a sale since its deal with Amazon was scuppered by EU regulatory scrutiny, warned it could be forced to seek bankruptcy.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy called it “a sad story” and an example of regulation gone wrong in an interview with CNBC today.
Sources tell Reuters and Bloomberg that the job cuts could start on Tuesday, potentially impacting almost 10 percent of Amazon’s 350,000 corporate employees across logistics, gaming, payments, and cloud computing teams.
Amazon last held a major round of job cuts at the end of 2022 and into 2023, when it laid off 27,000 workers.
GM — on the latest Decoder — used the word “cobot” in a transparent bid to assuage workers concerned that the robots operating alongside them will soon replace them. As we learned this week from Amazon’s proposed usage of the friendlier term: human replacement is definitely the plan.
This detailed summary shows some of the issues that caused the October 20th outage and took swaths of the internet offline for roughly 15 hours.
Amazon says its changes in response include temporarily disabling DynamoDB DNS Planner, adding “additional protections” to prevent applying incorrect DNS entries, and improving its testing to identify the kind of recovery problems that caused the outage to drag on.
[Amazon Web Services, Inc.]
